The iPhone’s Focus mode (almost) kept me off my phone on vacation

I was rather impressed by the iPhone Focus mode I set up for my March vacation, but my circumstances were a bit more unusual and it did give me some interesting feedback ideas on the tools. I thought it would be fun to discuss how people have used vacation modes so far.

In my case my big spring vacation is an annual cruise with an interesting group of people. I use the vacation as an excuse to go fully into "Airplane Mode" for a week and use my phone mostly as a camera and calendar with no internet or cell access. There are only just a few apps that I need while on the cruise ship, including the ship's own app, and an app unique to our group.

It was neat being able to setup a page on the home screen just for that vacation, with the apps unique to it, and set that home page as the only home page to be shown while in that focus mode. It was pretty neat having an entire week where the home screen only showed just a couple apps.

I think most of my complaints about that ability are from just that it is still a page in the normal non-Focus Mode default view of the home screen. I don't need this page in normal life and would like to hide when not in that Vacation focus. Having to scroll through it now is mostly benign though, especially when I remember to use pull-down Search instead of swiping through all the pages to get to the App Library. Also, you currently still can't have the same app shortcuts or widgets on more than one page at a time. In this case that was mostly fine because the cruise-specific apps I don't need any other time and I had just enough calendar apps that I could put an extra calendar widget on that page that didn't clash/replace/move the calendar widget I prefer on my "main" (first) page, and while I wanted a Camera app shortcut, I also realize that there are gestures for it including the lock screen shortcut and it wasn't a huge loss not to have that convenience of also having it on my Vacation focus mode page. I could imagine focus scenarios where that is much more inconvenient.

Those issues aside, it was rather pleasurable to reduce my phone state to such a tight couple of apps home screen for a very relaxed week.